Field
The present invention relates to physical access control, and more specifically, to verifying a ticket of a user from the biometric data of the user.
Description of Related Art
Tickets for mass transportation, musical venues, sporting events, etc. are generally intended for personal usage and are intended to be non-transferable. For example, a day pass for a public transit system may be issued with the expectation that a single person uses it a few times in a day. If multiple people were to share it, then the cost of honoring the pass would be far above expectations for a single person. To avoid this problem, the transit authorities need a way to check that the person using the ticket is the one who it was issued to.
One existing solution to this problem is to print a picture of the authorized user on the ticket. However, a drawback to this approach is that printing the tickets as a result becomes expensive, e.g., for a single-day ticket. Further, verifying users can become a slow and error-prone process.
Another existing solution is to issue a special electronic device to each authorized user. This device stores the ticket information and biometric data for an authorized user. At usage time, the device obtains actual biometric data from the user, compares the actual biometric data to the stored biometric data, and notifies the central system whether the user is authorized. However, this solution requires mass-manufacture and distribution of single-purpose devices to each user, which can become prohibitively expensive.
As the foregoing illustrates, what is needed in the art is an accurate, scalable, and inexpensive way to verify that people only use tickets that have been assigned to them.